Management FAQ
Short answers to the questions that come up when you're balancing Underroot. Each one links to the page with the full detail.
How do I make the game easier or harder overall?
The Maw is your fastest overall dial. For an easier run, raise grace_period and lower pressure_growth_per_day; to tighten the screws, do the opposite. Both live in balance.json → maw. If you only want to touch a handful of things, start with The Levers That Matter Most.
Which single number moves difficulty the most?
base_chew_rate (balance.json → maw, default 1.0). Everything about how fast the Maw eats scales off it, so a small change ripples through the whole run. Nudge it by 0.05, not by whole numbers. Context in Maw Threat and Escalation.
I changed a value in the JSON and nothing happened. Why?
Usual suspects: the file didn't save, the game is still running with the old value (restart it), the key is misspelled so the game fell back to its built-in default, or the file picked up a UTF-8 BOM that broke parsing. The data validator catches the last two. See The Safe Change Workflow.
How do I test a balance change without shipping a bug?
Edit the JSON, run the data validator (you want DATA OK), run the smoke test (you want SMOKE PASS), then play the affected slice in the editor. Commands are in The Safe Change Workflow. Don't edit the matching constant in a .gd file — the JSON wins, so you'd only confuse yourself.
Can I retune the economy without touching code?
Yes. Villager trades and the Scout's Wager live in trades.json, tasks and their rewards in projects.json, and every material's value anchor (trade_value) in materials.json. It all prices off Value Points — The Economy Model explains the anchor, and The Villager Economy has the trade tables.
How do I change how fast a day passes?
time.day_duration in balance.json (default 360.0 seconds). It's the master clock: the Maw's grace and pressure and the survival drain are all measured in days, so this one number re-paces the entire run at once. Layers and Progression Pacing covers the knock-ons.
Where do I tune storms?
Mostly in code, which is the catch. Storm death counts, stock-loss percentages, and cadence are constants in WeatherManager, so changing them is a dev task, not a data edit. Only the rain and storm interval multipliers are data/challenge-driven. Weather and Storms lays out what's tunable and what isn't.
How hard is each Challenge, and can I retune them?
The effect sizes for all six built-in Challenges and the twelve Artificer's Harrow dials are in Challenge and Harrow Modifiers. One caveat: these live in script constants (ChallengeManager, HarrowManager), not JSON, so retuning them is a code change.
What's the safest place to start tinkering?
Material values and villager trades. They're forgiving and self-contained, and they won't soft-lock a run the way the Maw's opening (grace_period, ramp_duration) can if you cut it too short. Materials and Mining Yield is a good first stop.